MaryE's blog: 2022 #131 Caterpillars, mantises, etc.

Today I got the string mop from outside the back door and there attached to the strings was a mantis egg case! I sacrificed a few mop strings in favor of saving the egg capsule which I know will contain several dozen little babies early next summer. When one of these egg cases hatched in my greenhouse the little guys only took a few minutes to scatter and hide. They were about a quarter inch long and came out of the egg case looking just like momma! It made me think of the far side comic showing a group of young mantis on a leaf being instructed by their teacher. The caption said "before you mature most of you will be eaten!" Oh the hard reality of a bug's life!

Another bug thing today was a female mantis I found with 3 males on her all trying to mate. Nobody ever told them that three is a crowd! She and all of her hopeful suitors were light tan. We also have green and a few darker brown mantis.

The third thing I found today was a yellow fuzzy caterpillar, crawling very slowly up the side of a shed. I looked on google and found a picture but mine was a bit darker yellow. Same type with the single black hairs on each end and two places along the body. It was about an inch and a half long an American Dagger Moth Caterpillar if you care to look.

The common black and orange wooly bear caterpillar I found yesterday had an average proportion of orange and black, so maybe it is forecasting an average winter.

All of these were found without looking for them. I'll have to look again for the very large spider with stripes across it's body that I saw last week suspended between branches of one of my grape plants.

And yesterday while moving bales of old straw and feed sacks full of compost I saw and killed a black widow spider. The straw and compost have nearly filled a bin that is 10 ft long, 30 inches wide and about 20 inches deep, the future home of an asparagus bed if the soil doesn't test too hot in the spring. If it does I will add more straw. I started with a layer of flakes off the straw bale, then covered it with compost and watered it, repeating three more times. I know it will shrink down to about half.

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